Barber: Warriors' lack of defense means series will go on

OAKLAND - Hey, Steve Kerr, what did you think of your team's defense Wednesday night?

“Not good,” Kerr replied after the visiting Los Angeles Clippers had beaten the Warriors 129-121 in Game 5 of a first-round NBA playoff series.

That was it. Full stop. Hey, Kerr's players couldn't be bothered to find an answer for Lou Williams or Danilo Gallinari. Why should the coach work hard for answers?

Anyway, “defense” is a loose term for whatever the Warriors were doing when the Clippers had the ball Wednesday. The Warriors were orange cones, set out on the playground for Williams to dribble around. They were outlaws popping up in an old-fashioned arcade shooting gallery, only to hold a frozen pose as Gallinari rose up to release a jumper.

Consider the situation at halftime. The Warriors had hit 10 of 16 3-point attempts. They'd made 51.2% of their shots overall. They had assisted on 17 of 22 made shots, the greatest indicator of “the beautiful game.” They had only five turnovers.

In other words, the Warriors' offense was a dangerous projectile in that first half. And yet they trailed by eight points. The visitors had wrested a 71-63 lead, thanks to the champions' alarming lack of urgency on the defensive end. That sort of score used to be a four-quarter total back when Kerr was coming off the bench for the Chicago Bulls. Halves aren't supposed to look like that.

“You've got to defend with some urgency,” Kerr said, revisiting the topic. “And we gave up 129 points on our home floor. And they shot 54%. And we weren't right from the very beginning - 37 points we gave up in the first quarter. Everything we did in L.A., we did not do tonight. We sort of seemed to take it for granted that we were going to be OK.”

Oh, and by the way, Kevin Durant went bonkers and scored 45 points for the Warriors. He was brilliant. Just not brilliant enough.

Here's one measure of the Warriors' ineffectiveness. They blocked just three shots. This is the shot-blockingest team in the NBA, one that averaged a league-best 6.4 snuffs per game during the regular season, and had blocked 33 in four previous games against the Clippers.

If you add rebounding into the equation - it isn't defense, precisely, but it is another function of effort, to a large degree - it all looks even worse. The Clippers out-boarded the Warriors badly for three quarters, extending their own possessions and making sure Golden State did no such thing.

Patrick Beverley was a particular annoyance. He's an elite defender, everyone knows that. But Beverley shouldn't be able to dominate the boards. He's 6-foot-1, for crying out loud. Several times he sneaked in among taller Warriors and grabbed rebounds. He wound up with a game-high 14.

“When you look at this game, at the end of the game, he was matched up with four and fives under the basket and he kept coming out with the rebound,” Rivers said of Beverley, referring to the code words for power forwards and centers. “It just tells you how tough he is.”

It also tells how you inattentive the Warriors were when the ball was en route to the rim.

The Warriors will survive this series - survive the Clippers. It is not their destiny to be on the wrong end of a 1-vs.-8 first-round matchup. But performances like Wednesday's make this postseason look treacherous. The Warriors will face teams that can score a lot easier than the Clippers. They'll face one in the next round, for sure, in the Houston Rockets. The Trail Blazers, Bucks or Raptors could come further down the road.

If the Warriors play defense like they did in Game 5, any of those opponents might score 150.

What's strange is that the Warriors had been so locked in on the defensive end in the previous two games. The Clippers couldn't get past 105 points in either of them, and it looked like the Warriors had finally figured out how to stop the pick-and-roll that Los Angeles' Williams and Montrezl Harrell were running. Wednesday, the Warriors couldn't stop the pick-and-roll, the pick-and-pop, the pick-and-save, the pick-and-grin or the pick-and-mortar.

There was a moment in the third quarter when it looked like they had turned things around. It started with defense - as it usually does with these guys. After the Clippers' Harrell was allowed to call timeout despite the technicality of not actually possessing the ball, the Warriors got their hackles up. Andre Iguodala stole a pass and threw the ball to Draymond Green, who went most of the length of the court for a layup that cut Golden State's deficit to 95-90. The Oracle crowd was vocally appreciative.

But the Clippers answered. These underdogs have some bite.

The Warriors ratcheted up the defensive intensity after that. In fact, it was at times ferocious in the fourth quarter, a frame in which the Clippers scored just 25 points.

But it was too late by then. Guys like Williams and Harrell weren't going to shrink. In fact, Williams only heated up.

“He's a great scorer,” Rivers said.” Just like Curry, just like Durant. In the games in L.A., they were trapping him a lot. So we took the picks away a lot tonight and iso'd him with space. And I thought that gave him room to work. … And when Lou gets his rhythm, he's tough to guard. He's been tallying in the fourth. He believes he's a closer.”

The result of Game 5 presents the Warriors with a great irony. Their lack of effort over three quarters must now result in extra effort. Instead of starting a second-round series against Houston on Sunday, as a win would have activated, they must travel back to Los Angeles for Game 6 on Friday. While the Rockets rest a couple extra days.

It's the last thing the Warriors wanted. They should have considered this when they were playing gin rummy, trading childhood tales and yawning on the defensive end over the first 36 minutes of Wednesday's game.